Oh, yes, indeed! To be savaged by the Evil Empire’s minions is a sure testament to one’s character. The Murdoch homunculi have a fine line in whingeing about ‘ad hominem’ arguments, when they are amongst the most enthusiastic proponents of the art, often with a leavening of snide pretensions to intellectual superiority which are funnier than Tony Hancock at the gentleman’s finishing school. Albrechtsen breaks me up with the preposterous pomposity of her claim that the Right ‘has won the battle of ideas’ as she peddles anthropogenic climate destabilisation denialist canards so floridly bonkers that they would even embarrass Barnaby Jones. In any case an accurate description of your typical Rightwing disinformationist crustacean must involve ‘ad hominem’ descriptions, otherwise it cannot be true to life.

It would be interesting if you could get a chart of sales on Amazon (or the data) so you could measure the extent of the ‘Rupert bump’. With an enemy like that who needs friends? “All publicity is good publicity except your own obituary.”

The Economics “Nobel” is nothing to do with Alfred except by the strange attaching “in Memory of Alfred Nobel” on the end of its name, and somehow the managing to get the Nobel Foundation to administer it. Full title: “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”. The prize was to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of a bank.